The Husband is down with a virus so it was not a good rest for us last night. Cough, cough. Toss, turn. You know the drill. He'll be fine, we think positively. Leftover garlicky ginger chicken soup was turned into a pot of garlicky ginger tomato soup this morning, which shall be good for a couple of days before he tires of that kind of soup. He's already on his way to losing weight for the 20-pound loss goal we each set on Christmas day (our present to ourselves) by the end of May. So. Here we are, the end of the year. An outrageous year for our nation, leaderless. Executive actions and congressional duplicity turning us down the path of darkness rather than so-called greatness. I want to think that we've reached the bottom and it's only up now. A lot of us have no problem standing up against harassment, intimidation, lies, misconceptions, ignorance, and down-right bullying. The personal score: A hysterectomy took away the cancer no one was really sure was there. T

Molly the Cat rubs her face from front cover to back cover of Under a Tuscan Sun , by Frances Mayes, rather than just one edge of the book. That's how much she is enjoys Mayes' memoir, too.  I'm taking my time with it, savoring a section or two with breakfast. I may have mentioned this before: Mayes has been inspiring me to turn the Mama's house into our home. Since the Mama's spirit soared into the universe last year, I have been reading a lot. The last time I lost myself in the virtual reality of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction was during my school daze. I read so much back then, the Mama would sometimes say to me, "You read too much. You're going to hurt yourself. Go outside." Today I've got it somewhat balanced. I read and I go outside. Sometimes, I read outside.

Quack, quack, quack. Watch out for me! So said the duck by the fence as I raked the leaves in the backyard. There are six of these blue-plate ducks hanging out in the yard. A friend asked, "Why don't you use them?" That was my plan when I fell in love with them in a thrift shop two birthdays ago. But, the only action the plates saw were inside a kitchen cabinet. The ducks are meant to be out in the open for us to enjoy. Of course what better place for them but in the backyard. Quack, quack, quack.   

On this winter day, the roses and daisies are showing off on our once-upon-a-time front lawn. How fortunate are we.

The Missus Lady is at a stage in her life where any story that has a combination of sweetness, magnificence, and wonder gets her crying. She was tearing up as we watched the preview of today's movie to recall what it was all about. Oh, my Missus Lady, purrrrrrrrrr . The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet (2013) Setting: Montana T. S. Spivet is an amazingly brilliant 10-year old boy who is into science. He lives on a ranch in Montana with his mother, an entomologist, his dad, a cowboy, his teenage sister, who wants to be Miss America one day, and Layton, his twin brother. T. S. is so gifted that the Smithsonian Institute wants to give him an award in Washington D.C. for his invention of a perpetual motion machine. Of course the institution think that T. S. is an adult and of course his family members are so self-absorbed that they don't notice when T. S. leaves the house one night. How does T. S. get to Washington D.C.? Who helps him on his quest? When the museum peop

By now, if our climate was the way it once was, the bougainvillea near the front window would have died back from the frost. Instead, one of its vines taps at the window, calling to us inside, "Hiya! What ya doing? A gorgeous day, don't ya think?" I suppose if the frost doesn't get the bougainvillea this year, I'll have to prune the vine away from the window.  The castle look in the Sleeping Beauty story really is not a good idea to attempt.                     

Suman is my all-time favorite Filipino dessert that the Mama made during the Christmas season when I was a kid. It is a decadent sweet rice concoction made from sticky rice (aka glutinous rice and sweet rice), brown sugar, and coconut milk. The delightfulness about suman is the memory of it being made, usually on a cold, rainy day. I'm anywhere from age four to seven. The Daddy cracks open two or three coconuts, pouring the juice into a waiting glass. I have yet to taste coconut water as good as what I drank way back when. The Daddy scrapes the coconut meat from the shell carefully and precisely on a a flat, round serrated scraper that he attached to a thick chunk of wood that he straddled. "I want to do it," I say every so often, as I watch the coconut transform into tiny slips of whiteness as it falls from the scraper into a large white metal basin with red trim. Eventually the parents let me sit on the homemade coconut scraper and try for a short bit. It is not easy